Ashkatar heaves a worried breath, indicating the cave with his whip. “Well—Veloc. Heldo-Bah. You heard him—you’d better go, damn it …”
Both foragers set their bags down near Keera’s, Heldo-Bah taking advantage of another moment: “Watch these for us, won’t you, Yantek? I hate to ask, but there is an order to things, in this life, and while some of us stand sentry, others must attend to—”
“Get inside,” Ashkatar warns. “And keep your business brief.”
Heldo-Bah laughs and takes to the pathway, leaving Veloc to ask, “Just what ‘request’ were you referring to, Yantek? If I may ask?”
“You may, Veloc. I want permission to lead a small raid across the river. Snatch one or two of Baster-kin’s Guard, and see what they can tell us.”
Veloc nods judiciously. “I believe we may have saved you that chore, Ashkatar …,” he says, following Heldo-Bah along the pathway.
“You—what?” Ashkatar shouts as they enter the cave. “What in blazes are you saying? Veloc! And it’s Yantek Ashkatar, blast your soul!”
But the foragers have already disappeared into the Den.
Within the Fifth District of Broken, a remarkable woman struggles to protect a secret, as well as a child, as her husband takes his leave of the city: at first triumphantly, and then most strangely …
ISADORA ARNEM REALIZES that she must hurry, if she is to have a meaningful amount of time alone with her husband in his quarters before the commencement of the Talons’ triumphant march out of Broken on their way toward their fateful encounter with the Bane. And so, after being helped on with her cloak by her two daughters, Anje (at fourteen already a wise young maiden) and ten-year-old Gelie, the most theatrically humorous of her brood of five, Isadora rushes to make a few final adjustments to her lustrous golden hair, gathering its thick tresses at the back of her neck with a silver clasp. She then kisses the girls, and calls farewell to two of her sons—Dagobert, the eldest at fifteen, and Golo, a very athletic eleven—who are playing at sword fighting with wooden sticks, having been inspired by their father’s parting words to them several hours earlier. Finally, she turns toward the central doorway of their home, a spacious if unpretentious Fifth District building composed for the most part of wood and stucco, and finds herself, unexpectedly but not surprisingly, faced with twelve-year-old Dalin, the last of the Arnem children.
Dalin has recently been selected by the God-King and the Grand Layzin themselves for royal and sacred service; service all the harder to refuse because he is not the scion of the Arnem house, but only its second son. It is a calling that the boy is eager to undertake, an eagerness that has caused the many noisy arguments with his parents, particularly his mother, that have of late driven his father to stand watch on the walls of the city at night. With dark, handsome features that strongly resemble Sixt’s, clever Dalin is also the most like his father in his pronounced stubbornness: all similarities that make it especially hard for Isadora to even think of parting with the boy, particularly when Sixt is about to embark on what may be a long and dangerous campaign.
Isadora sighs, seeing that Dalin is blocking her exit and preparing to debate the subject still further. “Don’t let’s fight anymore, just now, Dalin,” his mother says. “I must be quick if I am to meet your father.”
But it is wise and very womanly Anje who takes charge of the situation. “Yes, Dalin,” the maiden says, dragging her brother out of the doorway. “Mother and Father will have little enough time to themselves, as it is.”
“That’s right, Dalin,” young Gelie adds; but then, at a hard look from her brother, she hides herself within the folds of her mother’s blue-green cloak. Peering out just once, she adds, “Don’t be so selfish, honestly!” before disappearing again.
“Be quiet, Gelie!” Dalin replies, angered that he cannot resist Anje’s strength, and must therefore yield the doorway. “You don’t know anything about it, you’re just a child—but Mother is perfectly aware that I should have gone into service long ago!”
“We can talk more about the matter when I return,” Isadora says, gently if wearily. “But for now, you must let me go and see your father off.”
“I know what that means,” Dalin says bitterly. “You’re hoping I’ll have forgotten about it—I’m not a fool, Mother.”
“Well,” Gelie declares, her wide eyes going particularly round. “You’re certainly making a very good show of being one!” And then, at another angry scowl from Dalin, she is back amid the folds of the cloak.
“Both of you, be quiet,” Anje commands, now pulling Gelie close to her, even as she maintains her grip on Dalin. “Go ahead, Mother—I’ll keep these two from killing one another.”
Isadora cannot help but give her oldest daughter, with whom she shares so much more than their similar types of great physical beauty, an amused and grateful smile; and then she says, “Thank you, Anje. But you may let me have one last moment alone with Dalin. I think I shall be safe.”
“I wouldn’t depend on it, Mother,” Gelie calls, as Anje drags her from the hallway into the sitting room nearby. “He’s dangerous, truly—I may be killed, after you leave!” As Anje pulls the little one along, Gelie adds, “Although, if I am, I’m sure no one in this family will care!”
Isadora chuckles, and for an instant light comes into her eyes, which are so deeply blue as to appear almost black, at moments. “That’s nonsense, Gelie, and you know it,” she replies.
Gelie forces Anje to pause. “It is?” she says brightly.
“Yes,” says Isadora simply, without turning to the girl. “You know perfectly well that your father would be devastated. So would the cats.”
Gelie turns, stamping her feet hard for effect as she enters the sitting room. “That’s cruel, Mother—just cruel!”
Laughing lightly at this declaration, Isadora looks to the doorway through which Gelie has disappeared, and murmurs, “I honestly think that we will have to find a king for that one to marry …” Turning to find Dalin still unamused, Isadora approaches a table by the entryway, taking from it a silver clasp. Her son knows the object: it depicts the face of a furious, bearded man, one of whose eye sockets is covered by a patch, and on whose shoulders sit two large, crow-like birds. Glancing at the clasp and wondering (not for the first time) why it is not Kafra’s face that smiles out from its surface, Dalin senses an opening, which he seizes as his mother fixes the clasp to the gown beneath her cloak:
“Mother—is it true what they say about you?”
Isadora’s blood stirs. “People say many things about your father and me, Dalin. Do you listen to gossip?”
“It’s not gossip—it doesn’t sound like gossip, at any rate.”
There will be no avoiding yet another subject that Isadora hopes to avoid, it seems: “And what is it that people say?” she asks.
“That you—they say—” The boy can scarcely form the words. “They say that you were raised by a witch!”
Her annoyance and anger deepening, but still scarcely detectable, Isadora says evenly, “She wasn’t a witch, Dalin. Just a wise, odd woman, of whom silly people were afraid. But she was the most learnèd healer in Broken, and she was kind to me—she was all I had, remember, after my own parents were murdered.” She faces the boy, filling her words with weight: “Besides, I’d like to think that you are wise enough not to listen to stories like that. You know that empty-headed people say all manner of malicious things about us, because your father is so important, but wasn’t born wealthy. Many in this city resent his success. But far more think him a great man—so, when you hear people talking about your parents, have the nerve to dismiss them for the worthless souls they are, and walk away. And now—” Isadora walks to the doorway at last. “I must go. Run inside, and if you don’t want to play with the others, then have cook make you something special to eat. Or, why not ask Nuen to tell you marauder stories, while you practice swordsmanship?”
Isadora refers to the strong, cheerful woman of eastern marauder stoc
k who has lived with the family as nurse, governess, and household servant for some thirteen years: ever since Arnem discovered her, along with several other women of her kind, during a brief campaign along the southeastern portion of the Meloderna valley, being used as slaves (and worse) in the fields and homes of grain merchants, in plain violation of Broken’s ban against such absolute servitude.
“All right,” Dalin replies, moving dejectedly away from her. “But I do know that you’re simply avoiding the subject of my service, Mother—and I’m not going to stop reminding you …”
As he disappears up the house’s central stairway, Isadora watches him go with a smile, the resemblance to his father occurring to her once again.
Finally, Isadora steps onto the stone terrace outside the doorway, and moves through the family’s spacious garden, which is surrounded by a ten-foot wall, on her way to a gate in the farthest side of that protective barrier, a wooden portal within a stone archway that gives out onto the Path of Shame.
The Arnem family’s garden is unique: the statuary, carefully tended plantings, and orderly pathways that fill the courtyards of the great houses in the First and Second Districts are absent, and disorder by design reigns. Some years earlier, before Dalin developed his troublesome preoccupation with the Kafran church, it had been the desire of all the children to create, within the safety of their garden’s walls, a space much like the dangerous but fascinating wilderness that covers the slopes of Broken’s mountain below the walled summit. In particular, the Arnem brood took adventurous pleasure from the scenery that surrounds the noisy course of Killen’s Run, the rivulet that emerges from beneath the southern walls of the city to make its way to the base of the mountain and join the Cat’s Paw, before that mighty river storms its way along the northern edge of Davon Wood.
Sixt Arnem was both amused and impressed by his children’s notion: for, as we have seen, he was and is not a man who shares the taste of the kingdom’s most important citizens for excessive fineries. And he saw in his children’s idea a chance for them to learn about the Natural world outside the city without being exposed to the dangers of panthers, bears, and wolves, to say nothing of those malignant creatures who hunt children whilst walking upright: those troubling citizens of Broken who let their Kafran belief in purity and physical perfection bleed into unnatural lust for the bodies and souls of the very young.
And so, Arnem proudly put the family servants at the disposal of his three sons and two daughters for several days, and the project was undertaken. Cartloads of large, mossy stones, along with smaller rocks worn smooth by the waters of Killen’s Run, had been brought into the Fifth District from their original resting places, to the consternation of most of that district’s inhabitants. So, too, were imported, in not inconsiderable numbers, those creatures—fish and frogs, newts and salamanders—whose natural home was the waters of the Run, where they sought safe remove in which to breed beneath its larger configurations of stones. The safety of these delicate beings would be increased by the children’s plan, although the initial experience of being transported proved to terrify at least a few past their ability to survive the trip; most, however, were safely deposited in the artificial streambed that was cut into the Earth through the whole length of the Arnems’ garden. Ferns, wildflowers, rushes, grasses, and young trees were carefully transplanted along the banks and hillocks that lined the new waterway; while, in the greatest offense to those few persons of fashion from the Arnems’ class who were aware of the doings in their garden, a very old and, some said, important piece of statuary—a fountain that depicted Oxmontrot’s son, the God-King Thedric, vanquishing a forest demon that spat water from its pursed lips—was smashed to bits by the family’s two strongest servants, who, like the rest of the Arnems’ staff, proved enthusiastic in assisting the children in realizing their vision of a wild mountain stream. Where the statue had once stood, the children oversaw the construction of a waterfall, with the fountain’s spring-fed waters tumbling over a group of large, piled stones and into a deep, cold pool.
From out of this lovely and calming collection point flows the garden’s artificial breck (as Isadora often refers to the thing, using what she had been told, as a child, was the language of her ancestors); and the breck forms several smaller falls and pools as it winds to the foot of the garden. Here the stream vanishes, joining the city’s sewer system beneath the gutter of the Path without; but the children made certain at the start to supervise the installation of a series of safeguards: fine metal grates covered by small rocks, supporting a sifting bed of gravel. This successfully keeps any living creature within the stream from being swept away, while still keeping its waters fresh.
As she walks through this unfashionable but lovely setting, Isadora allows the peace of the garden to give her a moment of calm pause, for she knows that, having left the ever-loud and sometimes (in Dalin’s case) hurtful activities of her own children behind, she must soon enter the Fifth District, and its busiest thoroughfare, the Path of Shame. Fortunately, it is the quietest time of the day, in the district: the hours when drunkards sleep off their revelries of the previous night, or half-wittedly prepare for their next round. As she steps through the arched door in the thick garden wall, Isadora pauses, attempting to savor the moment. Yet there can be such a thing as too much quiet, even in the Fifth District. For, along with the sounds of adult debauchery and corruption, the comforting sound of children at play—children of an age that would make them suited to enter the royal and divine service—is also noticeably muted. But the diminution of this sound is not a change that varies from day to day; it has been steadily declining for months and even years, although Isadora tries to put meaningless explanations to the change, such as the citizens of her district having become so concerned with intoxication of various kinds that even fornication is losing its place in their schedule of daily activities—
But there have long been other explanations for the change, she knows, explanations whispered even by drunkards: tales that Isadora has assiduously driven from her mind. Now, however, she listens, she must listen, more carefully to these stories of Kafran priests and priestesses, protected by Lord Baster-kin’s Guard, coming by night to pay poor couples to place their children in the God-King’s service, because the pool of worthier families’ children is too small for the royal retinue’s purposes—shrouded as those purposes may be …
Whatever the reasons behind the momentary and relative quiet in her district, Isadora is forced, on this unseasonably warm afternoon, to hold her breath against the stench of the gutters outside her garden wall, and to hurry along the stretch of the Path of Shame between her house and the district wall. Affairs in this least squalid portion of the Fifth are declining, without doubt, just as matters are growing worse every day in the district as a whole. Granted, they were none too good even during Isadora’s childhood, when poverty had been but the first of her troubles. Her parents had been murdered by a thief in the district when Isadora was but six years old: the couple were rag- and rubbish-pickers, gleaning an existence from the enormous, redolent mounds of trash assembled by the nightly practice of running enormous wooden ramps out atop the southwestern wall of the city and dumping the populace’s garbage out onto the steep face on that side of Broken’s mountain. Whatever usable goods Isadora’s parents could wrest from these vast piles they bartered in a small stall that they operated in one of the less fashionable streets of the Third District; but despite the distasteful, backbreaking nature of this existence, the couple were devout Kafrans, convinced that, if they kept faith with the golden god, he would one day reward them with riches enough to grow old in peace—and that, whatever the case, it was better to worship a god who offered such hope in this life than it was to offer prayers to one who asked them to wait until the next reality for pleasure and satisfaction of all kinds.
Instead of such rewards, however, their sole blessing for devotion to Kafra was murder: they were stabbed to death by a drunkard as they returned to t
heir home and daughter one evening, after what (for people of their desperate station) had been a particularly good day of trading. Following this tragedy, the woman who had long occupied the house next to theirs—the remarkably knowledgeable yet often-disagreeable old healer called Gisa—decided that she would take in the dead couple’s spritely little daughter. The girl had often been a visitor to the crone’s small, startlingly clean house, the walls of which were lined by seemingly endless numbers of vials, jars, and bottles, each of which contained some magical substance Gisa called medicines, medicines that nearly every citizen in the Fifth District (and a great many outside it) knew to be far more effective than the treatments of the Kafran healers.
Gisa offered to make of little Isadora both a ward and a student; and in time, as the child progressed from mere assistant to apprentice, she also came to understand that her mistress’s insistence on remaining in Broken’s seamiest district was no simple matter of poverty. Her work among the poor of the Fifth was not lucrative, but the secret cases she undertook in the dead of night in other districts (cases in which the Kafran healers revealed the extent of their ignorance) certainly were. Yet a spirit of mercy, as well as a refusal to abandon the old gods of the region that Oxmontrot forged into Broken, all meant that Gisa would never leave the Fifth District. In time, her ward came to adopt similar sentiments and beliefs, in part because she determined to carry on Gisa’s medical practice after the crone’s eventual death, but also because of the manner in which her parents’ murders had been treated by the God-King’s servants.
Or, rather, because of the manner in which those killings had been assiduously ignored by those same officials. The poverty and disheveled appearance of the victims, their lack of pride and ambition, had marked their deaths, to every Broken priest, as religiously and legally—to say nothing of morally—irrelevant, no matter the extent of their devotion to the golden god in life. In time, Isadora bitterly accepted this fact, enough so that she began to make plans to carry on not only Gisa’s work but her ancient faith; and when, as an adult, she further emulated her teacher by periodically answering calls to save the life or ease the suffering of some worthy personage in the wealthier parts of the city, she, too, was very well paid for her efforts—but only, like Gisa, secretly. Finally, the most unqualifiedly happy events of her adult life—her encounters with and eventual marriage to Sixt Arnem, and the subsequent births of their children—were also a result of her decision to forgo Kafran celebrity and beliefs, and to remain in the streets of her childhood: her loyalty to the Fifth District was, through all these events, sealed.